ABSTRACT

Focusing on shocking closures in the two contemporary Assamese short stories – Imran Hussain’s ‘Jighansha’ (‘The Slaughter’) and Harekrishna Deka’s ‘Bandiyar’ (‘The Prisoner’) – this chapter studies how the sudden eruption of political terror rents asunder naturalised ideas of the everyday and the ordinary. Adopting a psychoanalytic approach, the chapter identifies a point of convergence between the two stories that accentuates the shock of the closures: the act of gazing, horrified, at the unresponsive eyes of a familiar other. These acts of gazing at unresponsive eyes signal the breakdown of a framework of intersubjective relationships that underpin the everyday and the ordinary represented in the stories. The effectiveness of such shocking closures is discussed along with possibilities of moving beyond such fictional frames in the chapter conclusion.